Busy January

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Caroline Chaboo

Luis Figueroa in our visitor’s cubicle

In my academic calendar, January is usually preoccupied with completing annual evaluations and submitting reports, and grant applications to the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). Our Entomology Division was uncommonly busy with several scientists travelling here to study parts of our Hymenoptera, Hemiptera, and Coleoptera collections.

Mr. Luis Figueroa, a colleague from San Marcos University Museum, Lima, Peru spent a month here studying the scarab beetles that I and my team have collected over several years from Peru. Luis identified many specimens and even found a potentially new species that he and collaborators will study further and perhaps describe as new to science. It is exciting when collections for my own research can benefit other colleagues’ work!

Dr. Paul Tinerella of the University of Minnesota-St. Paul (http://www.nepomorpha.org/), his doctoral student Gretchen Wilbrandt, and one undergraduate REU-supported researcher, Ms. Jamee Snyder (Fig. 1) visited us to examine our famous Hemiptera (true bugs) collection. Even though we have no active Hemiptera researcher on staff now and this part of the collection is not growing as fast as other taxa, our collection remains a valuable resource to the international community. We are one of 34 museums collaborating in the NSF-supported project http://tcn.amnh.org/, led by Dr. Toby Schuh at the American Museum of Natural History, to digitize and recurate North American Hemiptera specimens and make data available online.